Apple Inc. Bets Big on Brazil

Apple’s push into emerging markets heads to another BRIC country.

As we saw in 2013, tech giant Apple(NASDAQ:AAPL) appears to be fighting a losing battle to keep up with the torrent growth of the overall smartphone market.

Indeed, Apple already dominates many developed markets like the United States, which are speeding toward saturation. This has forced Apple to double down on emerging countries like China to sell its iProducts in ever-greater numbers.

Betting big on Brazil In clear sign of where it sees future opportunities, Apple opened one of its famous retails stores last weekend in Brazil's Rio de Janeiro. This is important for several reasons.

For starters, its new Brazilian store marks the 15th country in which Apple now claims a retail presence and its first store in all of Latin America. The Latin American smartphone market as a whole should be a key driver of global smartphone growth in the years ahead, and Brazil should be the primary growth engine in the region. In fact, by 2017, the Brazilian smartphone market should see 71 million shipments alone.

In the following video, tech and telecom analyst Andrew Tonner discusses the opportunities that Apple should see in Brazil in the years to come.